It is common knowledge in economic science that a free, non-regulated market economy does, generally speaking, fail to allocate good and services efficiently and does not result in a fair distribution between individuals due to market failures. Some of the most important market failures are related to the existence of public goods and externalities. To secure a society’s overall welfare, there is a need for regulation and interventions to correct for market failures.

Market-based fisheries management systems give incentives to reduce the fleet size and employment, which increases earnings and contributes to resolve the tragedy of the commons. However, the often-stated expectation that economies of scale cause the disappearance of small-scale fishery is not observed in many cases. In this study, we investigate the effects on fleet structure in the period after introducing individual fishing quotas or individual fishing days with various degrees of transferability in selected fisheries in the seven Nordic countries. Despite observing economies of scale in most cases, it is found that the market-based fisheries management often does not reduce the small-scale fleet more than the fleet of large vessels. This is explained partly by small vessels targeting demersal species and large vessels pelagic species, and partly by the larger need of larger than small vessels to continuously utilize their capital stocks through fast adaptation to ensure return. A more important explanation is the regulation design, with limitations in sale of fishing rights and lease between vessel groups and regions and in the share of the total quota holdings of fishing rights by individuals and vessels. This is important for countries considering the introduction of market-based fisheries management, since the Nordic experiences show that with proper regulation design, economic gains can be achieved with small-scale fishing surviving even under economies of scale.

The main aim of this publication is to highlight the current thinking in ecosystem service valuation for the marine environment. Valuation of the benefits stemming from marine ecosystem services, including often unnoticed benefits to society, can help to assess the long-term sustainability of blue growth, support policy development and marine management decisions, and raise awareness of the importance of the marine environment to society and in the economy. Recommendations are made on how to incorporate outputs from valuation studies into the traditional analyses used in resource and environmental economics and into the European marine policy landscape and related management and decision making choices. The publication is primarily aimed at stakeholders interested in valuation of marine ecosystem services and natural capital accounting, spanning diverse roles from commissioning, managing, funding and coordinating, to developing, implementing, or advising on, marine ecosystem service and natural capital programmes. Such programmes will have strategic and policy drivers but their main purpose may vary from predominantly research driven science to provision of valuation data and reporting to legally-binding regulations or directives. The main focus is on European capabilities but set in a global context with the various actors spanning a variety of geographical scales from national to regional and European. Key stakeholder organizations include environmental or other agencies; marine research institutions, their researchers and operators; international and regional initiatives and programmes; national, regional and European policy makers and their advisors. It will also be of interest to the wider marine and maritime research and policy community. The publication recommends:1.Marine ecosystem valuation should be used to support policy making, regulation and management and decision making;2.The quality and availability of monetary and non-monetary valuation data should be improved and increased through research, development and implementation actions;3.The spatial and temporal dimensions of ecosystem valuation need to be mapped and their implications for policy and management decisions assessed;4.In order to strengthen the use and derivation of ecosystem service values to support policy, regulation and management, underpinning research and development actions should be undertaken:a.To improve understanding of the role of marine biodiversity and ecosystem processes in providing services and benefits;b.To improve modelling approaches to support ecosystem valuation and decision making;5.Systems to enable and use marine natural capital accounting and enhance the experimental ecosystem accounts should be further developed and implemented including:a. A natural capital portfolio approach utilising existing marine data sets and assessment results and addressing scale and aggregation as well as ecosystem degradation;b.Valuation methods for both ecosystem services and assets that can be standardised and are compatible with National Accounting;c.Payment for marine ecosystem services and other financing mechanisms to restore marine natural capital and improve its sustainable use.

To assess the likely economic outcomes to fishing fleets of the Landing Obligation (LO), bioeconomic models covering seven European fisheries, ranging from the North East Atlantic to the Mediterranean, have been applied to estimate the economic performance of fleets before and after implementing the LO. It is shown that for most of the analysed fisheries, their economic outcome will be negatively affected in the long term by the LO, when compared to the expected outcome with no LO. Efficient mitigation strategies (exemptions, quota uplifts, improved selectivity, effort reallocation and others) may, for some of the analysed fisheries, reduce the negative economic effect of the LO. Moreover, the possibility to trade quotas, both nationally and internationally, may also reduce the economic losses caused by the LO. However, even with mitigation strategies and/or quota trade in place, most of the analysed fisheries are worse off under the LO than what could be expected if the LO was not implemented.

Previous article No AccessReviewsEconomics of the Marine. Modelling Natural Resources. By Karyn Morrissey. London-New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, 166 pp., hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-78348-558-1.Peder AndersenPeder AndersenUniversity of Copenhagen, Denmark Search for more articles by this author University of Copenhagen, DenmarkPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Marine Resource Economics Volume 33, Number 1January 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/694470 Views: 59Total views on this site HistoryPublished online October 18, 2017Received August 12, 2017Accepted August 17, 2017 © 2017 MRE Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Unwanted by-catch is a serious problem around the world. Often, by-catch is discarded and results in direct food waste, and indirectly often influences biodiversity, stock abundance and long-term catch. To minimize by-catch problems, various fisheries management rules are applied, such as legal minimum sizes of landed fish, mesh sizes in fishing gears and closed areas. A more dramatic approach is to reduce the discards of unwanted catches by a landing obligation for all caught fish, independent of size and quality. For some years, this has been part of the fishery policy in countries such as Norway and Iceland. This chapter provides a framework for analysing the consequences of the landing obligation (LO). The empirical analyses of the economic consequences of the landing obligation give some insights into the impacts on the commercial fisheries. The examples look at the short-term impacts (no or limited behavioural changes) and the medium- and long-term impacts when fishing pattern and fleet size can be adjusted.

Governments spend significant financial resources on fisheries management, especially on enforcement, research and management administration. For many of the world's fishing nations, the large government expenditures on fishery management services impose significant burdens on both taxpayers and the regulated fishing community. The shift towards user charges accelerated in the 1980s and is penetrating fishery management. There are several issues to be resolved when designing cost recovery programmes for fisheries. Since there are multiple methods for recovering costs, it's important to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the different types of user charges and financing mechanisms. This chapter examines the issue by formally considering the application of a royalty to recover the cost of enforcement in a fishery. It develops a formal model of cost recovery in a fishery and uses the model to analyse how the use of a royalty to recover enforcement costs affects bioeconomic outcomes and fishery management policies.

Fishery policies are broadly debated in the Nordic countries, focusing on balancing biological concern of fish stocks, economic return to society and coastal communities’ interests. Market Based Fi ...

We develop a model to identify the welfare-optimal management of fisheries that operate in the global economy. Historically, fisheries economics has mainly focused on the loss of rent due to fleet overcapacity and less on the potential welfare gain by having a broader approach to fisheries management. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap. The model is applied to the pelagic fisheries of the Northeast Atlantic and considers the whole value chain, identifying resource rent and consumer and producer surpluses. The results show that the sum of the resource rent and the producer surplus in the harvest sector in 2007 was 32% of the landing value, compared with the maximum economic yield of 49%. Hence, the fisheries were quite well managed. To achieve the maximum sum of the resource rent and the producer surplus in the harvest sector, the fleet must be reduced from 156 vessels to 80 vessels. However, it must only be reduced to 93 vessels if the objective is to maximize economic welfare. The analysis shows that the main source of welfare improvement through the improved management of the North Atlantic pelagic fisheries is linked to the harvest sector (rent and producer surplus gains) and, to a lesser degree, to value chain gains. However, consumers will gain by moving from rent maximization to welfare maximization as long the fish stocks are above MSY levels.

Selvom dansk fiskeri ikke er af stor makroøkonomisk betydning, har erhvervet stor politisk bevågenhed. Dette skyldes bl.a. de store omlægninger, erhvervet har været igennem. Artiklen ser på denne udvikling og tre aktuelle emner: landingsforpligtelsen, BREXIT ogkoncentrationerne af fangstkvoterne.